Ripple CEO Claims Bitcoin Is Under Control of Small Group of Miners from China

Ripple CEO Claims Bitcoin Is Under Control of Small Group of Miners from China

On June 12th, 2018, according to one of the financial news outlet – TheStreet.com had reported that the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, had made a statement saying, “Bitcoin is really controlled by China.” This particular statement was made by him at the 2018 Stifel Cross Sector Insight Conference, conducted at Boston.

What did Brad say?

Lee Simpson who is the analyst at Stifel Tech, had an interesting interview with Ripple’s Brad, wherein he spoke a lot about various topics such as blockchain technology, perks of crypto universe as well as dwelled on how Bitcoin is very much under the control of none other than China.

The following are few excerpts from the interview.

He said, “I’ll tell you another story that is underreported, but worth paying attention to. Bitcoin is really controlled by China. There are four miners in China that control over 50 percent of Bitcoin. How do we know that China won’t intervene? How many countries want to use a Chinese-controlled currency? It’s just not going to happen.”

He has also spoken about BTC’s as well as XRP’s blockchain technology. His fascinating opinion is as quoted, “the blockchain technology will not disrupt banks, although it will play an important role in the way our system works, but it’s a short-sighted view.”

After mentioning about BTC and XRP, he mentioned proudly about how Ripple’s XRP is considered as the “the best digital asset for settlement. Bitcoin today takes 45 minutes to settle a transaction, whereas XRP takes four seconds to settle.”

BitMex Report

In the month of February, BitMex, which is one of the trading platforms, had released a particular report. The report emphasized on the Ripple’s XRP Token and how the structure of Ripple’s consensus protocol suggests a more centralized structure to their currency.

According to the report, BitMex’s research team conducted an internal test with Ripple’s technology. The team installed and ran a copy of Rippled, the node operated by downloading five public keys from the Ripple’s server, all of which were assigned to Ripple.com. Four of the five keys were reportedly required to support a proposal in order for it to be accepted. The report said, “Since the keys were all downloaded from the Ripple.com server. Ripple is essentially in complete control of moving the ledger forward, so one could say that the system is centralized.”

Also, another new study by University of Texas’ staff released today, suggests that half of the BTC price surge in December last year was explicitly due to Tether and issuer Bitfinex. The paper describes transaction patterns, which show that Tether was “used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.” It also stated that the purchases with Tether were “timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices.”